Why is it heavily discounted?
Why is it heavily discounted?
Most owners and HR leaders have grown up with a contingency model of recruitment as their relationship with recruitment partners. It has reached the point where a discussion rarely occurs about what model to use or a recognition that there are other and sometimes better ways to do it.
The reality for every business is that unless we are Google, we operate in a competitive environment. We have predictable costs in delivering value to the customer and we add a margin on top of these costs. The only way that a discount can be offered long term is by cutting costs. Apart form the occasional unique situation, that rule is set in stone.
Where the costs come from in Contingency model recruitment.
Recruiters have two primary sources of costs over and above the fixed costs of buildings, web sites and things like phone bills and so forth.
1. Advertising for candidates is a large cost and unavoidable. Having a database of your own helps, but its often overestimated in terms of saving potential.
2. Staff costs. The people who answer phones, make calls, send and respond to emails and whittle down the list of CVs to the point where one is good enough to submit for your attention. It’s a time consuming and exhausting job that requires specialist skills. It also requires skills that are not focused on finding the best candidates for you as much as ensuring they are not working a “dead-end” requirement.
Let’s be crystal clear about one thing, everything the recruiter dos is paid for and the person footing that bull is you, the client. That’s how the world works. Every hour spent on wasted effort is a hour worth of your money down the drain.
Its easy to take a short-term view that you only pay thee on who made the placement and not the others, but that’s where you’d be wrong, read on and Ill lay it out for you like your average recruiter would be nervous to do.
The true cost of contingency recruitment.
Any recruiter you buy a beer for will explain this just as I am about to do. A recruiter finds a client and begins to recruit for them. That client already has 3 or 4 other recruiters on their books also on a contingency basis and they may well add a further recruiter without letting the current recruitment partners know.
Each recruiter on that panel is likely to have very similar rates typically 20-25% in high demand professions, but rarely below 20% of one year’s salary.
What this means for the recruiter is that they will on average work hard and cleverly on 4 requirements for that client in order to get paid for one.
Lets assume a salary rate of 50k and a commission rate of 20%, the actual payment will be £10k when it arrives.
That £10k is not paying for the effort on one recruitment requirement but on 4.
The net result of all this is that an agency in this typical model earns £2.500 per placement, not £10,000.
The effort you are getting is £2500 worth of hard work * 4 or £10,000, but the value you are getting is somewhere between £2500 and £3000 worth of recruitment. That’s a loss of 7,000 or more for you.
How recruitment really works and the myth of passive candidates.
The assumptions made by HR and by head-hunters, is that in order to get the best hires, you need to attract people who are already in other roles and not out of work; passive candidates.
This is not entirely inaccurate, if you need to import rather than develop or refine the skills for a specific role, then you need to import the skills. There is often a problem here in that if you lack the skills and the recruiter’s expertise is in recruitment, it could be something of a lottery, but let’s move on.
We all have databases of people who’ve applied in the past and agreed to targeted offers, so we match these to your requirement and send them the advert etc. This works well for temps, short term etc but for senior roles it only occasionally brings in an solid candidate. Most of the time, and I’m talking the high nineties percentage-wise, the only way is to advertise.
Its not just job-seekers who are exposed to adverts. Millions of workers have profiles and alerts set up that will be triggered by the right advert and then they will see the advert for your role, decide this could be the role they’d been waiting for and apply.
The challenge is that regardless how many recruiters you hire, all of them with very few occasional exceptions, are relying n precisely the same job-boards and advertising platforms to find candidates. The only thing that will differ is how they word their adverts and how they view the applicant.
75% of the money spent on recruitment in many areas goes straight down the drain
Were there one advert out there instead of four, the same candidates would have applied to the one advert. If your one recruiter had interpreted your requirement differently and failed to show you a potentially useful CV, that’s a failure of communication and from time-to-time unavoidable, but its not a reason to spend four times as much as you need to spend.
If you are ready to test this and see the savings for yourself, call our recruiters, or visit the website at
Wwwww and select Discounted Fixed Fee when you add your requirement.
You will most likely never consider a contingency based arrangement again.
Industry average rate 20% via Contingency model. That will cost 5% via Discounted Fixed Fee
A job, or occupation, is a person’s role in society. More specifically, a job is an activity, often regular and often performed in exchange for payment “for a living”Many people have multiple jobs e.g., parent, homemaker, and employee. A person can begin a job by becoming an employee, volunteering, starting a business, or becoming a parent. The duration of a job may range from temporary e.g., hourly odd jobs to a lifetime e.g., judges.
An activity that requires a person’s mental or physical effort is work as in “a day’s work”. If a person is trained for a certain type of job, they may have a profession. Typically, a job would be a subset of someone’s career. The two may differ in that one usually retires from their career, versus resignation or termination from a job.
Types of jobs
Jobs can be categorized, by the hours per week, into full time or part time. They can be categorized as temporary, odd jobs, seasonal, self-employment, consulting, or contract employment.
Jobs can be categorized as paid or unpaid. Examples of unpaid jobs include volunteer, homemaker, mentor, student, and sometimes intern.
Jobs can be categorized by the level of experience required: entry level, intern, and co-op.
Some jobs require specific training or an academic degree.
Those without paid full-time employment may be categorized as unemployed or underemployed if they are seeking a full-time paid job.
Moonlighting is the practice of holding an additional job or jobs, often at night, in addition to one’s main job, usually to earn extra income. A person who moonlights may have little time left for sleep or leisure activities.
The Office for National Statistics in the United Kingdom lists 27,966 different job titles, within a website published 2015.